😡 How many times did Amazon split my shipment?

Over at AccelerList we just launched our new LIVE batch feature where we give you the ability to see what warehouse your items are going to as you scan them… along with the ability to generate box content labels for your shipment.

So to give the newest feature a good run through and test, we scanned in 100 CDs to be sent of to Amazon FBA.

BTW – we’re not just software creators…we’re Amazon sellers, just like you!

When listing on LIVE mode you can also set it to “speed” listing where you pre-fill a lot of batch parameters like price point, condition, etc to speed up your listing process so this batch didn’t take long at all.

So knowing and hearing around the “Amosphere” that Amazon was going to begin to split shipments at a much higher frequency we were curious to see what Amazon’s API returned for us on this 100 item batch.

Amazon split my shipment

How many warehouses would it split to? How many would be selected for each warehouse?

To our surprise…it was really bad.

Amazon split my shipment to 5 different warehouses on a total of 100 items. Here is how it broke down (we are HQ in Los Angeles):

IND1: 47 items

ONT8: 44 items

EWR4: 4 items

MSP1: 2 items

PHL7: 2 items

The reason why this is really troublesome is because other than IND1 & ONT8 with roughly 40+ items due to be sent out…the remaining three warehouse selections only had a few items in those shipments which means I’m going to have to find a tiny box or padded envelope to send the items and waste the extra shipping charges.

Or I could scrap those items from my batch and put them to the side and either trash them, sell them elsewhere, or hope that I can list them later and they get put into a better warehouse.

Nothing new actually…

If you’ve been selling on Amazon for any length of time you’ll know that split shipments have always been a problem and an annoyance to even the most savvy of sellers but as they continue to dominate the market and grow…they’ll undoubtedly get even more self serving as split shipments saves them a “warehouse” full of money.

What are your thoughts on Amazon split shipments?

We would love to hear your best practices for split shipments below in the comment section. Some folks have a great system for minimizing the time suck on split shipments.